Why are skirmish bots impossible to fight?

Game Discussion Balance
1

There’s only 2 ways to defeat the bots in skirmish:

-Clump together into a death ball and focus fire an entire team onto ship at a time, and hope they don’t manage to form a deathball of their own.

-Try to cheese their pathfinding and objective prioritizing so you can capture more beacons. One person gets dogpiled into oblivion while the team secures victory.

 

Direct confrontations are SUICIDE.

1 on 1 fights are SUICIDE.

Destroyers are a WASTE OF CREDITS

You WILL DIE if you try to defend a beacon, capture it and run away. If they get there before you capture it, abort and wait for them to leave.

They have enough survivabilty to tank your shots for 15 seconds straight while STATIONARY, meanwhile they vaporize you with 100% laser-focused efficiency in 2-3 seconds, no matter how you maneuver.

 

I just need to vent. I’ve been playing this mode for hours and it’s not remotely fun to play.

2

1 hour ago, Weylin29651 said:

There’s only 2 ways to defeat the bots in skirmish:

-Clump together into a death ball and focus fire an entire team onto ship at a time, and hope they don’t manage to form a deathball of their own.

-Try to cheese their pathfinding and objective prioritizing so you can capture more beacons. One person gets dogpiled into oblivion while the team secures victory.

 

Direct confrontations are SUICIDE.

1 on 1 fights are SUICIDE.

Destroyers are a WASTE OF CREDITS

You WILL DIE if you try to defend a beacon, capture it and run away. If they get there before you capture it, abort and wait for them to leave.

They have enough survivabilty to tank your shots for 15 seconds straight while STATIONARY, meanwhile they vaporize you with 100% laser-focused efficiency in 2-3 seconds, no matter how you maneuver.

 

I just need to vent. I’ve been playing this mode for hours and it’s not remotely fun to play.

That mode  is not ment to be fun or played for hours,mate

3

It depends entirely on your ship and how you use it.

You are fine using a destroyer against non-ellydium teams and you will likely dominate bots with that.

Flying an interceptor is wrong unless you are extremely good in it but still heavier ships would be better.

Full Ellydium bot teams are always a trouble but are doable.

It’s easy to beat even full Ellydium bot teams in TDM with a result ~27-0 if you have a team that takes correct ships.

Good Guard will be able to easily get 3k+ Efficiency points and 10+ kills. Properly built Guard will beat Thar’ga bot in 1vs1 without losing shield. You can win in guard against few Ellydium ships at once but you need to have correct loadout and a good cover.

Use cover when possible and when fighting against frigates exploit their blind spots to reduce damage.

Use fighters only when you know what you want to do with them.

Destroyers are bad against full Ellydium teams if there’s nobody to support you. 

 

I’m not telling that bots are fine, no. Ellydium bots need nerfing and all bots should have some sort of jitter to prevent them from having 100% accuracy all the time, this makes laser bots annoying, laser bots can destroy interceptors and fighters too easily. However bots aren’t impossible to beat.

4

This is what i use against bots, the playstyle can be replicated with any engineer but its best played with Octopus (doesnt matter if you dont have one). My current setup is with beam cannons which dishes out a fair amount of dps on par with bots with active tank that can be on the same level when timed right. It’s a foolproof design that can get you the win even with bad teams and its easy to learn.

5

“you gotta use this special build or ship to win” means that something is very wrong.

 

OP is probably talking about how enemy bots insta-pop interceptors if they get focused. (heaven forbid you are carrying a bomb within 5,000m of a bot frigate.

6

2 hours ago, TheDarkRedFox said:

“you gotta use this special build or ship to win” means that something is very wrong.

 

OP is probably talking about how enemy bots insta-pop interceptors if they get focused. (heaven forbid you are carrying a bomb within 5,000m of a bot frigate.

No, he means “that’s very effective build against AI”. I have a guard build just for vs AI. If I focus on shooting and tanking I usually end up with 15 or more kills. 

6 hours ago, Weylin29651 said:

There’s only 2 ways to defeat the bots in skirmish:

-Clump together into a death ball and focus fire an entire team onto ship at a time, and hope they don’t manage to form a deathball of their own.

-Try to cheese their pathfinding and objective prioritizing so you can capture more beacons. One person gets dogpiled into oblivion while the team secures victory.

 

Direct confrontations are SUICIDE.

1 on 1 fights are SUICIDE.

Destroyers are a WASTE OF CREDITS

You WILL DIE if you try to defend a beacon, capture it and run away. If they get there before you capture it, abort and wait for them to leave.

They have enough survivabilty to tank your shots for 15 seconds straight while STATIONARY, meanwhile they vaporize you with 100% laser-focused efficiency in 2-3 seconds, no matter how you maneuver.

 

I just need to vent. I’ve been playing this mode for hours and it’s not remotely fun to play.

I can show you a few videos that:

  • I can go mano a mano (my current record is tanking 6 enemy ships at the same time)

  • my Spark with lasers cuts through enemy interceptors like a butter

  • you CAN kill AI lrf in a covert ops, dodging it’s laser

 

AI logic is basically on par with old T2 PvP (aka - beginners), to compensate when you play R12 or higher are getting boosts to their damage and health. Except ellydium - all ranks below are playing against bare, normal ships. The only real challenge in vs AI is Ellydium team which can be killed only if there is a proper team composition (like you have at least 1 engineer in a team). Then I’ll take a guard and it usually ends up in Ellydium massacre.

screenshot-190307-234518.jpg.384139dcb05b1a72d04ce4660b9cb731.jpg

 

Otherwise - if there is Ellydium team and I need to cover beacons - I’m usually taking tackler or recon and try to outsmart them (like let them take the beacon, wait till the counter hits 100%, then they move away and I can recap) - or taking a support ship -  LRF or guard. Due to my disability I am poor intie dogfighter, but when needed I can outmaneuver bot ships - it’s a matter of proper build and knowledge of enemy ship layouts. 

In summary. In vs AI it’s pretty important to have a proper group composition. So flying a ship that doesn’t fit on battlefield or using it in non-designed role (like trying to tank with tacklers vs 2 enemy frigates) doesn’t make sense and should be avoided. And that’s what this mode is about - to teach pilots how important is a teamplay, ship build and ship roles. Understand those three and you will have no issues in skirmish vs AI.

 

7

“u gotta use frigs to win”

Oh no

8

10 minutes ago, TheDarkRedFox said:

“u gotta use frigs to win”

Oh no

Please read carefully what I wrote. Most of the time that’s what is needed on the battlefield (see the entry about tacklers trying to tank). I like to fly Spark if there is a need for damage dealer as well - my lineup is usually Empire LRF, Guard, Gunship, Recon. Lately I usually swap LRF for engineer as that’s the role I see less and less on the battlefield. So in the context of “u gotta use frigs to win if there is a guard/engineer missing” then yeah, sure. But if you mean “you can only fly a frigate to win in vs AI” - you are mistaken. As I said - team composition is the key to win any battle, but it just shines in vs AI.

9

I just wanted to help with something thats easily achievable, i could’ve handed him the cyning build just as well since i use it vs ai to train my active combos but that is far from easy to play…

10

Thanks for the tips and stuff.

 

Yeah, it’s possible fight the AI, but it must be done through pure unit strength superiority like you encounter on Real Time Strategy games, such as how it’s favorable to fight 6v1 6 times rather than 6v3 2 times. Because of the high accuracy and aggressive focus-fire of the AI, any equally numbered clash in uncovered space will result in an AI victory, so using cover and doing peek-a-boo tactics that confuse the AI is essential.

 

Once the AI forms into a large group, life becomes much harder for you and your team, I’ve seen several games lost the moment the AI gets into our spawn and reach a critical mass. Few can get their bearings and reach a safe position in time, and even then they are left to watch their allies get spawn-camped.

 

Anyhow, it’s possible to do with specific tactics, but it’s not really fun. It feels like playing level 20+ missions… so much health on enemies that fully unloading an entire destroyer broadside into a single target is insufficient to deal with half their health, and then there’s 20 more of them chipping you down rapidly.

11

7 hours ago, Weylin29651 said:

Thanks for the tips and stuff.

 

Yeah, it’s possible fight the AI, but it must be done through pure unit strength superiority like you encounter on Real Time Strategy games, such as how it’s favorable to fight 6v1 6 times rather than 6v3 2 times. Because of the high accuracy and aggressive focus-fire of the AI, any equally numbered clash in uncovered space will result in an AI victory, so using cover and doing peek-a-boo tactics that confuse the AI is essential.

 

Once the AI forms into a large group, life becomes much harder for you and your team, I’ve seen several games lost the moment the AI gets into our spawn and reach a critical mass. Few can get their bearings and reach a safe position in time, and even then they are left to watch their allies get spawn-camped.

It means that you never played higher, coordinate level of PvP in this game - as this is exactly what player squads are doing: isolate and focus fire. The AI behaviour is based on that tactics. I know that the current random PvP is just a shadow of what it was before and most of the time it would fall in old T1 category (no team play, people with random builds) or maybe T2 (some experience, still lack of target priorities, no coordination), but up to around R11 you should meet only equal ships - no boosts to HP or damage - with the exception of Ellydium team. On the other hand I see much more focus fire and player coordination in vs AI than in random PvP (which is good as vs AI was designed to train pilots in such things to implement those tactics in PvP). However there is one key difference - AI bots will focus on one player/objective only if player will allow them. They can be really quickly dispersed, which leads to killing them one by one. And because they are playing on very low level - they will fly straight from the respawn to the current target, making them nothing more than a moving targets. They don’t regroup. They can be really easily outsmarted. Also I don’t agree that  the only way to beat AI bot is to focus fire from all team - it helps and it speeds up the game, yes. But if you know what are you doing there is no problem to score 12 kills on fighter without dying. Yesterday I was flying a tackler and one of my teammates was flying a gunship. We scored 26 kills out of 30 that our team did. We lost 3 points. Game was vs R13-R15 ai bots (Karuds, Maulers, some destroyers, T-Rexes). Also I disagree that equally sized furball ends in AI victory - it all depends on team composition. If enemy is coming with heavy damage dealers with destroyer support and your team has only light ships without heals - then the result will be obvious. However if you have like engie, LRF, guard and fighters against such force I cannot see how bad your teammates have to be to lose with such composition (ekhm - that is almost exact our team PvP composition, btw). So - team composition. don’t stay in the open, don’t fly straight - 3 base truths that should be hammered into any recruit by a training officer in any corporation - work in PvP and vs AI equally well. Then it comes to details like “isolated enemy LRF is an easy target for any covert ops due to its blind spot on the back”, “make sure you have at least two types of damage when attacking guard” etc etc. 

 

7 hours ago, Weylin29651 said:

Anyhow, it’s possible to do with specific tactics, but it’s not really fun. It feels like playing level 20+ missions… so much health on enemies that fully unloading an entire destroyer broadside into a single target is insufficient to deal with half their health, and then there’s 20 more of them chipping you down rapidly.

Dessies with Halo are ineffective against most of the AI, especially against interceptors. Not to mention that if you are under fire with your destroyer - you have chosen wrong ship. Destroyers are suppressor class - they are meant to stay behind friendly lines and suppress enemy (think - machine gun nests). My favourite destroyer for vs AI was Brave with triple heatsinks and Coil Gun as it can track even interceptors. This is especially useful against Ellydium as Tai’kin takes only 20% of damage from Halo and missiles. However I wouldn’t take a destroyer if there are no guards in my team - guard in Team Battle vs AI is simply the most useful ship as it can easily survive even concentrated fire in the initial phase of battle. 

12

Usually i just facetorp myself and use the energy converter at the same time to act like a jedi cutting down the bots right away, the best scenario is at the start of a game when all the bots align in a row so i severely damage them and by the time the other players arrive it’s just free kills for them.

13

My tactic depends on the gamemode and tasks I have to do, just win battles and it’s a beacon or detonation game? Take a recon. Deathmatch? Destroyer, or something that has a bit of tank if you’re not too confident or going at high tiers, but try to stay close to obstacles, you can throw off their aim better that way. If you have a really fast and manoeuvrable ship you can dodge pretty much everything, provided you know how as some have some pretty specific tactics.

14

Tyrant, static shields, warp stream detector. That is possibly the easiest way to farm bots.

15

2 hours ago, Scar6 said:

Tyrant, static shields, warp stream detector. That is possibly the easiest way to farm bots.

Tyrant is the easiest way to farm just about anything lmao. I love it so much but it’s just. So. Slow.

16

1 hour ago, TheDarkRedFox said:

Tyrant is the easiest way to farm just about anything lmao. I love it so much but it’s just. So. Slow.

Ideal for adaptives to trigger ![:D](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/006j.png “:D”)